Congo's President Joseph Kabila said Thursday that his country's voters must accept a proposed post-war constitution later this month if elections are to be held in 2006.

The search for possible victims of an earthquake near the lakeside town of Kalemie in eastern Congo (DRC) continued along the shores of Lake Tanganyika on Tuesday, humanitarian and provincial authorities in Goma, capital of North Kivu Province, said.

The French charity, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) says that the army in northern Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has blocked relief workers from entering the area since beginning a military campaign against local militias there in mid-November.

The man in charge of elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was in Brussels on Monday to assure the Belgium government, which is providing him funding, that the first round of voting would take place as scheduled on 18 December.

Some 60,000 people fleeing fighting between the Congolese army and local Mayi-Mayi militiamen resisting demobilisation have now arrived in the village of Dubie in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Katanga Province, Roman Catholic Bishop Fulgence Muteba said on Tuesday.

Some 1,000 people who had fled their homes to live in the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital, Kinshasa, for six to nine years have returned to their villages in the provinces of Equateur in the northwest of the country and Orientale in the northeast, humanitarian aid workers said on Thursday.

Expressing serious concern about the continuing hostilities by militias and foreign armed groups in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the threat to elections in the country, the Security Council today extended the United Nations Organization Mission (MONUC) there until next September, with an additional 300 troops.

A court in the Democratic Republic of Congo sentenced eight presidential guardsmen to life imprisonment on Tuesday for the murder of an official of the national aviation agency.

Public schools in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have reopened after a delay caused by 230,000 teachers who went on strike from 5 September to demand better pay.

A humanitarian aid association, Solidarités, launched on Wednesday a drinking water distribution network for 170,000 people in North Kivu Province in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).